29 research outputs found

    Establishing IUCN Red List Criteria for Threatened Ecosystems

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    The potential for conservation of individual species has been greatly advanced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature\u27s (IUCN) development of objective, repeatable, and transparent criteria for assessing extinction risk that explicitly separate risk assessment from priority setting. At the IV World Conservation Congress in 2008, the process began to develop and implement comparable global standards for ecosystems. A working group established by the IUCN has begun formulating a system of quantitative categories and criteria, analogous to those used for species, for assigning levels of threat to ecosystems at local, regional, and global levels. A final system will require definitions of ecosystems; quantification of ecosystem status; identification of the stages of degradation and loss of ecosystems; proxy measures of risk (criteria); classification thresholds for these criteria; and standardized methods for performing assessments. The system will need to reflect the degree and rate of change in an ecosystem\u27s extent, composition, structure, and function, and have its conceptual roots in ecological theory and empirical research. On the basis of these requirements and the hypothesis that ecosystem risk is a function of the risk of its component species, we propose a set of four criteria: recent declines in distribution or ecological function, historical total loss in distribution or ecological function, small distribution combined with decline, or very small distribution. Most work has focused on terrestrial ecosystems, but comparable thresholds and criteria for freshwater and marine ecosystems are also needed. These are the first steps in an international consultation process that will lead to a unified proposal to be presented at the next World Conservation Congress in 2012

    Rhetoric and reality in the allocation of water to the environment: a case study of the Goulburn River, Victoria, Australia

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    Economic Instruments for Water Pollution Control: The Australian Experience

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    Australia's smoke city: air pollution in Newcastle

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    The City of Newcastle has been viewed as marginal to the main narratives of Australian history, despite its contribution to industrial development being likened in importance to that of a Pittsburgh or Birmingham. A focus on visible air pollution makes it possible to reposition Newcastle as the centre of environmental innovation, largely because of the knowledge gathered by Novocastrians about smoke abatement in the Anglo-American industrial cities upon which it modelled itself. The reduction of smoke in Newcastle since World War II is attributed partially to the City Council activities, but also to the displacement of pollution elsewhere, both within Australia and to the Asian cities to which coal is exported
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